Icecrown, Part 1

I just got through watching a video on the Gunship Battle encounter in the upcoming Icecrown Citadel, and I have to say I'm incredibly impressed with how it looks so far.  It has some very innovative mechanics involved, and similar to the Twins fight in ToC, feels a lot like a fight that's there mainly to play around.  The inclusion of jetpacks, the requirement to split focus between many different (but not instagib) damage sources, to prioritize targets and who's doing what...

This is the precise sort of fight that was missing in Ulduar and ToC, requiring everyone to be paying attention and looking out for themselves, but not to the point where they get instagibbed if they make a mistake (but if they make several in quick succession, they likely will die).  Beyond that, the fight has motivation behind it, fighting off the intrusion of enemy faction as you battle for control of the citadel's access rampart, instead of just gibbing these random monsters, demons, undead, or PMSing gladiators that the Argent Crusader brought in to try to kill off as much of their army as possible.  It's a fight I can get involved in and have fun with in addition to the challenge.

Sindragosa's fight looks similarly interesting, a true evolution of the Sapphiron fight.  Instead of a stack Frost Breath that kills anything it touches, now it moves around (and there's a lot more of them), doesn't hit as hard, but still needs to be avoided.  On top of that, the raid chooses when the iceblocks are removed (as they have to kill them).  Lastly, the Unstable Magic mechanic sounds like a very interesting way for a caster to go out in a streak of glory before getting instagibbed by a 40k+ arcane bomb.  Mages, of course, can simply Ice Block out of it, though >.>

Then on the other side there's the Lord Marrowgar encounter.  Of the 5 fights I've seen in ICC to date, this one looks by far to be the most dull, basically a tank and spank with ridiculously slow lines of fire to avoid (they don't even follow you like Archi's did), spears of ice to kill, and the same annoying whirlwind of death kite that Skadi in Utgarde Pinnacle has, and that's pretty much the entire fight.  Not terribly innovative or engaging.